My eyelids weigh a thousand pounds each. I try to open them and nothing happens. Try again. The muscles refuse to cooperate, like they’ve forgotten how to take orders from my brain.
The headache hits next. A splitting, nauseating throb that radiates from the base of my skull and wraps around my temples like a vice. My mouth tastes like copper and ash. Cotton-dry, tongue thick and swollen.
What happened?
Fragments surface. Broken pieces reassembling in the wrong order.
Hands, catching me as I fell. The smell of expensive cologne and leather underneath. A voice, low and certain,I have you.
I have you.
My eyes fly open.
The room swims into focus slowly, shapes resolving through the fog of whatever is still swimming through my bloodstream. The ceiling above me is impossibly high, and… frescoed unless I’m hallucinating, angels and clouds and gold leaf that catches the afternoon light streaming through tall windows. Beneath me, there’s a massive bed, its frame wooden and intricately carved, draped with a silk canopy overhead. The furniture around me looks antique, and there’s an expensive Persian rug on the floor.
The room is beautiful, it’s also unfamiliar.
The memory crashes in all at once, a wave breaking over my head and dragging me under.
The café. His face across the table, those dark eyes watching me with an intensity I should have questioned. The coffee. My legs giving out. The world tilting sideways. Falling.
He drugged me.
The panic hits me full force, heart slamming against my ribs, breath coming in short, sharp gasps that don’t seem to bring in any air. I try to sit up, and the room spins violently, bile rising in my throat.
My body won’t cooperate.
He drugged me. The fucking psycho drugged me.
I push myself up on arms that shake like I’ve run a marathon, and the room tilts sideways. My legs feel as though they’re filled with wet sand. Heavy. Useless. I swing them over the edge of the bed, and the floor seems miles away.
Bathroom. I need a bathroom right now or the contents of my stomach will end up on the Persian rug.
There’s a door, half-open, white marble visible beyond. I stand, my legs buckling immediately, and I catch myself on the bedpost, fingers digging into carved wood. One step. Two. The floor pitches beneath me like the deck of a ship in a storm.
I make it to the bathroom just in time.
My knees hit cold marble as I lunge for the toilet, and then I’m vomiting, violent, heaving spasms that empty my stomach of everything. The coffee. The ricotta pastry Rosa brought me. Whatever else was in there, whateverheput in there. The second wave hits before I can catch my breath. Then a third. My fingers grip the porcelain rim, knuckles white, as my body tries to turn itself inside out.
When there’s nothing left, I keep heaving anyway. Dry, painful contractions that make my ribs ache and my eyes water. I slump against the toilet, face pressed to the cold rim, tears streaming down my face.
I hate this. Hate the weakness, hate the way my body has betrayed me, hate that somewhere in this building he’s probably watching me on a camera, seeing me like this. Broken and pathetic and helpless.
Get up.
I force myself to stand. My legs are still shaking but hold. I grip the edge of the marble sink and stare at my reflection in the mirror above it.
Except it’s not really a mirror. Not glass, but polished metal, slightly warped, the kind they use in prisons and psychiatric wards. The kind you can’t break into a weapon.
The air goes cold in my lungs.
I search the bathroom with shaking hands. Cabinets first. No razors. No scissors. No glass bottles of any kind. The soap dispensers are built into the wall, tamper-proof, pumping out some kind of unscented liquid.
Unscented. He knows. The sick bastard knows what fucking soap I use.
I find a toothbrush in a small holder by the sink. Purple. Soft bristles. Exactly like the one I have at home, but brand new. The toothpaste is the brand I use. Floss. A hairbrush. Everything Iwould need, everything I would choose, as if someone walked through my apartment in Palermo and took notes.
I barely reach the sink before the dry heaves return, my whole body clenching around nothing, trying to purge something that isn’t there anymore.
